I haven’t had the chance to write about any “dark side” social media stuff in a loooooong time. But today I caught wind of “Subvert and Profit” (blog) and they make no bones about their intentions. The opening paragraph sets the tone:

“Content-pushers and social bookmarkers rejoice! The democracy of web 2.0 is about to get a major dose of capitalism as the crowdsourcing revolution begins. This revolution will bring you money, should you choose to embrace it. Subvert and Profit, our brand new site, is leading the charge.”

Apparently they’re starting with Digg and plan to move on to other social news and bookmark services. Advertisers pay $1 per Digg and diggers get paid $.50 per Digg. Oh my, this is pure capitalism alright, of the super spam sort.

The sheer irony of this post nearly kills me as I’ve had it in my queue to post for a few weeks now. In a presentation I gave at SES Chicago, a video interview with WebProNews and in previous blog posts, I have articulated both a naive confidence in the social news communities at being able to capably police spam as well as reasons not to spam social media in the first place.

And yet the effort was made within the digg community to disallow any stories from Online Marketing Blog from being submitted to digg with no chance of a human evaluation of the situation or process of reinclusion. digg has taken a DMOZ style persona in handling such matters with the puzzling part being domain names can be banned as a result of actions that have nothing to do with the owner of the web site. At least Google and Yahoo are mature enough to have a review and reinclusion processes in place